Nutritional Economics
Encyclopedia
Nutritional Economics is a synthetic concept that deals with the interplay between economic systems, nutritional status
and food security
, and how changes in the former affect the latter. If economic and environmental changes in a community affect access to food, food security, and dietary health, then this interplay between culture and biology is in turn connected to broader historical and economic trends associated with globalization. Nutritional status affects overall health status, work performance potential, and the overall potential for economic development (either in terms of human development or traditional western models) for any given group of people.
state that the reciprocal gift exchange, competitive gift exchange, and impersonal market exchange are all reflective of dominant paradigms of social relations within a given society. The main forms of economy extant around most of the world today, in terms of a simple production, distribution, consumption model, are subsistence based and market economies. Subsistence refers to production and consumption on a small-scale of the household or community, while a market-based economy implies a much broader scale of production, distribution, and consumption. A market economy also entails the exchange of goods for currency, versus bartering commodities or being under continuing reciprocal gift exchange obligations. This is not to say that market economies do not coexist with subsistence economies and other forms, but that one type usually dominates within a given society. However, a broad array of scholarship exists, stating that market economies are rapidly increasing in importance on a global scale, even in societies that have traditionally relied much more heavily on subsistence production. This economic shift has nutritional implications that this entry will explore further.
Foraging, also known as hunting and gathering
, is a subsistence strategy in which a group of people gathers wild plants and hunts wild animals in order to obtain food. This strategy was the sole mode of existence for human beings for the vast majority of human history (inclusive of the archeological and fossil record) and continued to be practiced by a few groups at least into the middle part of the 20th century. This mode of production is generally associated with small, nomadic groups of no more than fifty, also known as bands. The vast majority of foraging societies do not acknowledge exclusive ownership of land or other major resources, though they do acknowledge primary use rights for groups and people may individually possess small objects or tools such as a bow or cutting tools. Because foraging usually involves frequent movement and taking food naturally available rather than altering landscapes for production, many scholars state the foraging has a minimal negative environmental impact compared to other modes of production. Though foragers are generally limited in absolute amount of food available in a given area, foraging groups such as the !Kung
in the Kalahari Desert
have often been cited as having a more diverse diet and spending less time per week procuring food than societies that practice other modes of production such as intensive agriculture.
Shifting cultivation
is a mode of production involving the low intensity production of plant-based foods; this mode is also known as horticulture or ‘slash and burn agriculture’ in some texts. Horticultural societies are generally situated in semi-sedentary villages of a few hundred that clear a field and burn the cleared vegetation in order to use the ashes to nourish the soil (hence the phrase slash and burn). Next, the group plants a crop or crops in this clearing and uses it for cultivation for several years. At the end of this period, the entire village relocates and starts the process anew, leaving the old clearing fallow for a period of decades in order to allow regeneration through the regrowth of wild vegetation. These food items can be supplemented through the raising of livestock, hunting wild game, and in many cases with the gathering of wild plants (Miller 2005; Park 2006). Though periodic movement precludes absolute permanent ownership of land, some horticultural societies fiercely defend current territories and practice violence against neighboring groups. For instance, Napoleon Chagnon
(1997) depicts the Yanamamo of Venezuela
and Brazil
as the “Fierce People”, though others have been highly critical of Chagnon’s account of this society. Horticulture can also produce a broad diet, and in some cases more food per unit of land area than foraging. Though populations of horticulturalists tend to have greater density than those of foragers, they are generally less dense than those which practice other modes of production. If practiced on a small scale, over a large area, with long fallow periods, horticulture has less negative environmental impact than agriculture or industrialism, but more than foraging (Miller 2005). Generally, horticulture coincides with a subsistence type of economy in terms of production, distribution.
Pastoralism
, defined as reliance on products from livestock coupled with a seasonal nomadic herding tradition, is similar to horticulture in that it is extensive in its use of land area. Social groups in pastoral societies tend to have similar numbers and population density to horticultural societies. Pastoral societies often trade animal products with agricultural societies for plant based foods to augment their diet. Frequent movement often means that pastoralism has a similar environmental impact to horticulture, though instances of overgrazing, and consequent land degradation (see later subsection under Globalization and Nutrition), have been sited in some cases. Pastoralism generally entails a greater reliance on meat or other animal products, such as milk or blood, than other modes of production. This mode of production has a similar use rights profile to shifting cultivation. Traditionally, pastoralism has coincided with a subsistence based economy, but in the last several decades, some pastoralist societies, such as Mongolia
, have herded animals and practiced nomadic living patterns but have produced livestock primarily for market exchange.
Agriculture
, sometimes referred to as intensive agriculture, involves clearing and using the same plot of land for an extended period, sometimes several generations; it also involves the use of plows and draft animals in the preparation of land for planting and the cultivation of crops. Agriculture often supports much higher population densities than other modes of production (except industrialism) and agricultural societies can range in population from a few thousand into the millions. Though agriculture produces more food per unit of land area than the previously mentioned modes, the tendency of agricultural societies to focus on relatively few crops has often meant that these societies have much less diverse diets than foraging and horticultural societies. There is some archaeological and fossil evidence that populations in transition from foraging to agriculture have tended to suffer reduced stature, reduced musculature, and to exhibit other markers of malnutrition. Research has suggested that agriculture paradoxically allows a higher, but less healthy population for a given area. The advent of agriculture has marked that advent of social stratification in many parts of the world, with marked differentials in access to resources between segments of the same society. This mode of production also is more likely to entail permanent individual or family ownership of particular tracts of land than previously mentioned modes of production. Agriculture has co-occurred with both subsistence and market economies, often with a single society exhibiting some degree of both types of economies and has a more negative impact on the environment than the aforementioned modes of production.
Industrialism combines agriculture with mechanized industrial production of goods through the use of fossil fuels. Additionally, industrial societies use mechanized equipment in order to prepare land for planting, harvest crops, and distribute food to locations distant from where the original crops were planted. Industrialism shows similar trends to agriculture in terms of population density, and environmental impact, except to a much greater degree. Dietary diversity can be highly variable under an industrial mode of production and can depend on access to foods produced for local subsistence on the one hand, or to income level and purchasing power visa vie foods available in food markets (Leatherman and Goodman 2005). Dietary diversity and nutritional health often correlate with the degree of social stratification within an industrial society and sometimes between societies. With the exception of Soviet model states, industrial societies are heavily based on the concept of private property rights and the accumulation of profit through “free enterprise”.
The general trend for many societies over the past several millennia has been toward agriculture, and in the past two centuries, toward industrialism. Though these two modes of production are by no means superior to other modes in every respect, the fact that societies that practice them tend to have larger populations, higher population densities, and a more complex social structure has correlated with the geographic expansion of agricultural and industrial societies at the expense of societies emphasizing other modes of production. Concurrent with this trend toward intensified agricultural and industrial production has been the rise of the social and economic paradigm of capitalism
, which entails the production and sale of goods and services in the market place in order to produce a profit. These trends have had profound implications for nutritional status for human beings on a global scale. In order to discern how broader economic and environmental trends affect a community’s food systems, food security, and nutritional status, it is important to summarize one of the most significant economic and ecological phenomena today, globalization
. The next section will treat the linkages between economic and ideological trends over the last several centuries and environmental and political economic factors affecting access to food and nutritional status.
an powers expanded beyond the European sub-continent to found colonies in the Americas
, East Asia
, South Asia
, Australia
and Oceania
. This expansion has had a profound impact in terms of wealth creation in Europe and extraction elsewhere, cultural changes in most of the world’s societies, and biological phenomena such as the introduction of several infectious diseases into the Western Hemisphere
, which caused tremendous disruption and population reduction for indigenous societies there. These events, far from occurring coincidentally, have had synergistic relationships, in one vivid example, the decimation of Amerindian populations through infectious disease often preceding and facilitating subsequent conquest by European powers. Such conquests in turn have often had significantly negative impacts on internal cohesion, ability of populations to attain adequate resources for their own subsistence and traditional social obligations, and local environments for colonized societies. In order to understand the effects of globalization on nutritional status and food security, it is important to understand the historical circumstances that have led to contemporary globalization, and that still manifest themselves in political, social, material, and physical/health differentials between (and within) the different peoples of the world today.
In “The Rise of the Merchant, Industrialist, and Capital Controller”, written by Richard Robbins in 2005, uses a hypothetical scenario of the reader as a “merchant adventurer” to detail economic world history starting in 1400. In 1400, China
was arguably the most cosmopolitan and technologically complex society in the world. It was a center of trade, along with the Middle East
, East Africa
, and ports on the Mediterranean Sea
. Western Europe
, while playing a part in this network, did not dominate it by any means; one could argue for European marginalization in fact. This circumstance began to change when the Europeans “discovered” the Americas, setting in motion a process that would disrupt many societies and devastate indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere. The dominant economic paradigm of this period was mercantilism
, whereby European merchants began to achieve power in world markets and in relation to European governing aristocracies. Robbins cites example of government protections that facilitated mercantilism in the form of exclusive proprietary rights to trading companies and armies used to protect trade by force if necessary. He details instances of government protection such as the example of how Great Britain
destroyed India's textile industry and turned that society into an importer of textiles is especially illustrative. In dealing with imperialism
, capitalism, and the rise of corporations, Robins further details the manner in which the “West” transformed various regions/peoples from proactive participants on global trade networks into sources of raw materials and consumers of European or North American
exports. This history of world trade is important to the consideration of current issues of disparity of power and wealth.
There are many critiques the policies of the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) in the promotion of high intensity capital investment in developing nations (e.g. Weller et al. 2001; Fort et al. 2004). Disparities within nations and growing poverty rates in many nations also provide compelling evidence of the idea that the rewards of economic globalization are uneven at best. There is a great deal of literature about globalization and increases in health disparities both between and within countries.
Finally, there is Amartya Sen
with Development as Freedom
(1999); here Sen disagrees about whether or not the world’s poor are getting poorer, but also maintains that this criterion is not the most important. He argues that relative disparities and power differentials are the most important problems of globalization. Sen states that the increasing interconnection of the Worlds societies can have positive benefits, but that the disparities and opportunities for exploitation must be mitigated to the greatest extent possible, if they can not be eliminated outright. Sen provides groundwork for a nuanced middle ground between unabashed proponents and opponents of globalization.
Far from being universally decried, the recent accelerated expansion of western capitalism, geographically, politically, and ideologically, has been lauded in many quarters. International and bilateral agencies such as the World Bank, IMF, and the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) have utilized free market capitalist theories extensively in development programs in many corners of the globe whose state aims are to promote economic growth for communities and nation-states and to alleviate poverty. Likewise prominent individuals such as former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan
and U.S. based journalist Thomas Friedman
have held forth extensively about the possibilities of economic and social improvement in developed and developing nations alike, mainly through increased access to appropriate education, sophisticated communications and transportation technology, and a paradigm of social and economic “flexibility”, where individuals and communities who can best adapt to rapid changes in the role of governments and the particular economic base of a given location would be in the best position to take advantage of the opportunities offered by economic, political, and cultural globalization. This free market ideology is also predominant in the policies and procedures of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) and many transnational corporations (TNC’s), most of which are headquartered in developed nations. The rise of Capitalism and the free market society have indeed increased and exacerbated food insecurity in the world's poor due to the structure and function of a Capitalist society where only those who can afford to buy food to feed themselves are the only ones with access to a secure and adequate food supply. Food is no longer a human right to life and health due to the Capitalist approach to commodifying food in the free market society that as a result of globalization has spread all over the world. Transnational corporations and trade organizations such as NAFTA facilitate this approach of commodifying our world's food supply by enforcing laws and regulations which further deepen the inequality of wealth and unequal distribution of common goods such as food between the rich and the poor.
In contrast to the “western” economic model, most early social scholarship about economics stressed the predominance of reciprocity as a primary driving force in traditional non-Western societies. Marcel Mauss
referred to the gift as a “total social phenomenon”, fraught with ritual and socio political as well as material significance. Though some objects, such as armbands or shell necklaces in the kula ring that runs through several island groups off the coast of Papua New Guinea
, might induce some form of prestige based competition, the terms of exchange are significantly different than a monetary transaction under a modern capitalist system. While Appadurai actually describes ritual objects as a type of commodity, he couches them as such under significantly different terms than the market-based types of commodity normally treated by economists. Annette Wiener criticizes earlier works in anthropology and sociology that depicted “simple” societies utilizing a simple version of reciprocity. Whatever the theoretical stance of social scholars on non-western traditional economies, there is a consensus that such essentials as food and water tended to be shared more freely than other types of goods or services. This dynamic tends to change with the introduction of a market-based economy into a society, with food coming to be increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than a social good or an essential component of health and survival.
Regardless of one’s overall perspective on the costs and benefits of economic globalization, there are several examples in social scholarship of groups of people suffering a decline in nutritional statues subsequent to the introduction of a capitalist market-based economy into an area that has previously practiced an economy based more on subsistence production and reciprocity. Although some people’s food security may improve with access to more steady income, many people in communities that have heretofore practiced a subsistence economy
may experienced greater food insecurity and nutritional status due to insufficient income to replace the foods no longer produced by a household. Whether the growth of food insecurity and socioeconomic disparities in many parts of the world in recent decades is an inherent part of globalization or a temporary “growing pain” until economic development attains its full efficacy is a matter of debate, but there are many empirical examples of communities being dissociated from traditional means of food production and not being able to find sufficient wages in a new market economy to achieve a balanced and calorically sufficient diet. Several factors affecting food security and nutritional status range on a continuum from more physical phenomena such as land degradation and land expropriation, to more culturally and socio-politically driven things such as cash cropping, dietary delocalization, and commoditization of food; one important caveat is that all of these trends are interconnected and fall under a broad category of socio-cultural and economic disruptions and dislocations under the current paradigm of globalization.
, with definitional variation depending in large part on the scholar or stakeholder in question, they do outline a general idea of reduced soil fertility and reduced ability of a given area of land to provide for people’s subsistence needs, as compared to earlier periods in human history on that same land area. Paul Farmer
discusses the effects of land degradation in central Haiti
on local people’s ability to produce sufficient food for their families within the environs of their own communities. Farmer links malnutrition in a Haitian village with vulnerability to infectious diseases, including tuberculosis
and HIV/AIDS, both in terms of chance of infection and severity of symptoms for those infected. While the extremely low percentage of the U.S. population involved in agriculture strongly suggests that direct access to arable land is not an absolute necessity for food security and nutritional health, land degradation in many developing nations is accelerating the rate of rural to urban migration at a more accelerated rate than most major cities are equipped to handle. Leatherman and Goodman also allude to land degradation co-occurring with decreases in food security and nutritional status in some communities in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo
. Walter Edgar discusses the correlation between land degradation and economic disruption, as well as nutritional hardship, in the U.S. state of South Carolina
in the decades following the Reconstruction Period. Coupled with land expropriation, land degradation has the effect of thrusting unprepared subsistence producers or other peasant farmers into a fast paced and complex market economy heavily influence by policy makers who are far removed from the concerns and worldview of small scale farmers in developing countries.
(NAFTA); in many cases, these subsistence producers are forced either to migrate to cities or work sporadically as agricultural labors. Since most if not all food must be purchased under these circumstances, the food security and nutritional status of these newer additions to the pool of poor unskilled labor often declines. Another common impetus for expropriation is non-agricultural “economic development”, often in the form of tourism. In one Example, Donald MacLeod details curtailment of subsistence activities, mainly fishing and cultivation, in areas of the Canary Islands
in the face of pressures from tourism interests wishing to monopolize the “pristine” beauty of locations catering to Germans and other tourists from EU nations. Ironically, local people see relatively little monetary benefit from the rise in tourism, as many vacations are planned by German
tour companies (linked with all inclusive German owned resorts in the Canary Islands) and are paid for before tourists ever arrive at their vacation destination. Leatherman and Goodman and Daltabuit point to circumscription of land available for traditional milpa horticultural production in communities in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo in the face of growing demands for land for resorts by tourism interests, under the auspices of the Mexican national government. One expropriation scenario with a long history is cash cropping, where crops grown for revenue from exports are prioritized over crops grown for local consumption.
in 1985, details examples of mono-cropping, or planting massive areas with one cash crop, in several Caribbean Islands, including Cuba. He states that Cuba went from being an economically diverse place with many small scale subsistence producers to a mono-crop plantation system dependent on cash from its sugar crop and substantial food imports for the later centuries of the Spanish Colonial Period. He describes Cuba as an example of growing impoverishment and malnutrition concurrent with increasing concentration of land and other resources in fewer hands. Gross and Underwood illustrate the mid Twentieth Century example of the advent of sisal production in Northeastern Brazil. These authors detail a vicious cycle of the unfulfilled promises of sisal
production for smallholders; because owners of sisal processing machines did not think small farms worth their time, small holders could not process and sell their sisal and were often forced to work as laborers on large farms. Sisal is cited as being particularly insidious because it is hard to eradicate once introduced and makes subsequent subsistence production virtually impossible. This article treats a common situation of households prioritizing working males in food allocation, exposing growing children to malnutrition, particularly under nutrition and micronutrient deficiency, and all of its attendant ills. Edgar discusses how exclusive planting of cotton
in the Southeastern United States during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries caused substantial land degradation, lead to a great deal of land expropriation from small scale farmers, and occurred in a context of widespread malnutrition. Especially in Today’s complex, accelerated version of globalization, cash cropping is intimately linked with the delocalization of diets and the commoditization of food and has profound, though varied, implications for food security and nutritional status.
Closely linked with delocalization is food commoditization, or the treatment of food primarily as a market commodity, rather than prioritizing other uses, such as sustenance, human rights entitlement, or social relations. Dewey describes the deleterious effects of food commoditization for rural communities in Central America, to include reductions in food security and nutritional status. Much of tourism literature details marked increases in the commoditization of food subsequent to the introduction of tourism as a form of market based economic development. Dewey and Robbins also state that when food is primarily seen as a commodity by powerful interests, not only does such an ideology increase delocalization, but also land degradation and expropriation as elite land owners or transnational corporations cause massive social and ecological disruptions in the process of mono-cropping food crops over broad swaths of land in order to reap maximum profits from overseas sales. Indeed delocalization and commoditization have significant potential to diminish food security and nutritional status in poor communities over broad areas of the world.
The deleterious effects of mild to moderate malnutrition
(MMM) not only pertain to caloric insufficiency (often closely associated with food insecurity) but also to poor dietary diversity; in particular, curtailed access to protein, complex carbohydrates, zinc, iron, and other micronutrients. The ways in which undernutrition and micronutrient deficiency interact with other health effects are myriad
. The most obvious manifestation of MMM, stunting is defined as height and or weight below the standard range for a particular age group. However, far from being a mere difference in height and weight, stunting was correlated with a wide variety of health effects. Closely related to stunting, level of physical activity closely articulates with nutritional status and affects childhood development. Chronically malnourished infants and toddlers showed decreased physical activity compared to supplemented groups or those who are adequately nourished.
Perhaps, the most critical facets of human development correlated to nutrition levels are behavior and cognition; development in these two areas could have profound effects on life chances for individuals and populations. In comparing a group of southern Mexican children subject to MMM and a group in the same region who received dietary supplements, Chavez et al. show a relation between MMM and poorer school performance; unsupplemented children showed poorer participation, greater degree of in-class distraction, more sleeping in class, and poorer performance on standardized tests. In addition, malnourished children showed poorer scores on intelligence quotient
(I.Q.) tests than their supplemented counterparts.
Of all the aspects of human existence, sexual reproduction
may have the most detailed articulation with malnutrition. In populations subject to MMM, menarche occurs later (15.5 years) than in adequately nourished populations; an early average menopause
(40.5 years) makes for a relatively short reproductive period for women in the study area for Chavez et al. Because of longer postpartum periods of amenorrhea, birth spacing was an average of 27 months, versus 19 months. Though longer birth spacing can help control population growth, the evidence that Chavez et al. present suggest a curtailing of reproductive choice and adaptability due to malnutrition. This study also linked maternal MMM with higher infant and young child mortality.
Another effect of MMM crucial to life chances is work capacity; MMM shows a cyclical pattern of decreasing work capacity and its rewards, further exacerbating the problem. Allen found a correlation between reduced VO2 max rates among MMM populations and decreased muscular strength and endurance in the performance of strenuous manual labor. Although personal motivation can have a strong positive impact on individual work performance, better muscular development associated with a history of adequate nutrition increases overall work capacity, irrespective of effort. Among Jamaican cane cutters, those within normal size range cut more cane than those who showed stunting. One cultural variation in this trend was found among MMM Guatemala
n workers who put forth work effort comparable to better nourished counterparts, but were likely to engage in resting behavior than in recreational or social activity during off hours. In wage economies where workers get paid in proportion to productive output, reduced work capacity can translate to reduced food security, increasing the risk of MMM.
Additionally, malnutrition and infectious disease
have a synergistic relationship that can lead to spiraling health deterioration. According to Allen, the incidence of infectious disease does not vary significantly between MMM and adequately nourished populations, but the duration and severity of disease episodes is greater for MMM populations. A key reason for this disparity is that infectious disease often results in poor food intake and nutrient absorption. Not only do sick people generally eat little, but what they do eat is often of minimal benefit due to nausea and diarrhea.
Aside from MMM due to under-nutrition or micro-nutrient deficiency, over-nutrition, defined as the consumption of too many calories for one’s body size and physical activity level, is also becoming an increasingly significant problem for much of the World. Overnutrition
has been associated with obesity, which the USDA and McEwen and Seeman correlate with increased risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease
, and stroke
. Overnutrition is also often associated with the co-occurrence of caloric sufficiency (or over-sufficiency) and micronutrient deficiency, as is often the case where processed foods that are high in calories, but low in most nutrients, increase in dietary prominence. Leatherman and Goodman and Guest and Jones discuss the growing coincidence of stunting and other symptoms of MMM and obesity within developing nations, sometimes within the same community. This trend can be linked to changing economies and food practices in much of the World under contemporary economic globalization.
Nutrition
Nutrition is the provision, to cells and organisms, of the materials necessary to support life. Many common health problems can be prevented or alleviated with a healthy diet....
and food security
Food security
Food security refers to the availability of food and one's access to it. A household is considered food-secure when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. According to the World Resources Institute, global per capita food production has been increasing substantially for the past...
, and how changes in the former affect the latter. If economic and environmental changes in a community affect access to food, food security, and dietary health, then this interplay between culture and biology is in turn connected to broader historical and economic trends associated with globalization. Nutritional status affects overall health status, work performance potential, and the overall potential for economic development (either in terms of human development or traditional western models) for any given group of people.
General economic summary
Most scholars construe economy as involving the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services within and between societies. A key concept in a broad study of economies (versus a particular econometric study of commodities and stock markets) is social relations. For instance, many economic anthropologistsEconomic anthropology
Economic anthropology is a scholarly field that attempts to explain human economic behavior using the tools of both economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with economics...
state that the reciprocal gift exchange, competitive gift exchange, and impersonal market exchange are all reflective of dominant paradigms of social relations within a given society. The main forms of economy extant around most of the world today, in terms of a simple production, distribution, consumption model, are subsistence based and market economies. Subsistence refers to production and consumption on a small-scale of the household or community, while a market-based economy implies a much broader scale of production, distribution, and consumption. A market economy also entails the exchange of goods for currency, versus bartering commodities or being under continuing reciprocal gift exchange obligations. This is not to say that market economies do not coexist with subsistence economies and other forms, but that one type usually dominates within a given society. However, a broad array of scholarship exists, stating that market economies are rapidly increasing in importance on a global scale, even in societies that have traditionally relied much more heavily on subsistence production. This economic shift has nutritional implications that this entry will explore further.
Modes of production and nutrition
The most important step in understanding the links between economics and nutrition is to understand major modes of production that societies have used to produce the goods (and services) they have needed throughout human history; these modes are foraging, shifting cultivation, pastoralism, agriculture, and industrialism (Park 2006).Foraging, also known as hunting and gathering
Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
, is a subsistence strategy in which a group of people gathers wild plants and hunts wild animals in order to obtain food. This strategy was the sole mode of existence for human beings for the vast majority of human history (inclusive of the archeological and fossil record) and continued to be practiced by a few groups at least into the middle part of the 20th century. This mode of production is generally associated with small, nomadic groups of no more than fifty, also known as bands. The vast majority of foraging societies do not acknowledge exclusive ownership of land or other major resources, though they do acknowledge primary use rights for groups and people may individually possess small objects or tools such as a bow or cutting tools. Because foraging usually involves frequent movement and taking food naturally available rather than altering landscapes for production, many scholars state the foraging has a minimal negative environmental impact compared to other modes of production. Though foragers are generally limited in absolute amount of food available in a given area, foraging groups such as the !Kung
!Kung people
The ǃKung, also spelled ǃXun, are a Bushman people living in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia, Botswana and in Angola. They speak the ǃKung language, noted for using click consonants, generally classified as part of the Khoisan language family...
in the Kalahari Desert
Kalahari Desert
The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savannah in Southern Africa extending , covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa, as semi-desert, with huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains. The Kalahari supports more animals and plants than a true desert...
have often been cited as having a more diverse diet and spending less time per week procuring food than societies that practice other modes of production such as intensive agriculture.
Shifting cultivation
Shifting cultivation
Shifting cultivation is an agricultural system in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily, then abandoned. This system often involves clearing of a piece of land followed by several years of wood harvesting or farming, until the soil loses fertility...
is a mode of production involving the low intensity production of plant-based foods; this mode is also known as horticulture or ‘slash and burn agriculture’ in some texts. Horticultural societies are generally situated in semi-sedentary villages of a few hundred that clear a field and burn the cleared vegetation in order to use the ashes to nourish the soil (hence the phrase slash and burn). Next, the group plants a crop or crops in this clearing and uses it for cultivation for several years. At the end of this period, the entire village relocates and starts the process anew, leaving the old clearing fallow for a period of decades in order to allow regeneration through the regrowth of wild vegetation. These food items can be supplemented through the raising of livestock, hunting wild game, and in many cases with the gathering of wild plants (Miller 2005; Park 2006). Though periodic movement precludes absolute permanent ownership of land, some horticultural societies fiercely defend current territories and practice violence against neighboring groups. For instance, Napoleon Chagnon
Napoleon Chagnon
Napoleon A. Chagnon is an American anthropologist and retired professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was born in Port Austin, Michigan...
(1997) depicts the Yanamamo of Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
and Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
as the “Fierce People”, though others have been highly critical of Chagnon’s account of this society. Horticulture can also produce a broad diet, and in some cases more food per unit of land area than foraging. Though populations of horticulturalists tend to have greater density than those of foragers, they are generally less dense than those which practice other modes of production. If practiced on a small scale, over a large area, with long fallow periods, horticulture has less negative environmental impact than agriculture or industrialism, but more than foraging (Miller 2005). Generally, horticulture coincides with a subsistence type of economy in terms of production, distribution.
Pastoralism
Pastoralism
Pastoralism or pastoral farming is the branch of agriculture concerned with the raising of livestock. It is animal husbandry: the care, tending and use of animals such as camels, goats, cattle, yaks, llamas, and sheep. It may have a mobile aspect, moving the herds in search of fresh pasture and...
, defined as reliance on products from livestock coupled with a seasonal nomadic herding tradition, is similar to horticulture in that it is extensive in its use of land area. Social groups in pastoral societies tend to have similar numbers and population density to horticultural societies. Pastoral societies often trade animal products with agricultural societies for plant based foods to augment their diet. Frequent movement often means that pastoralism has a similar environmental impact to horticulture, though instances of overgrazing, and consequent land degradation (see later subsection under Globalization and Nutrition), have been sited in some cases. Pastoralism generally entails a greater reliance on meat or other animal products, such as milk or blood, than other modes of production. This mode of production has a similar use rights profile to shifting cultivation. Traditionally, pastoralism has coincided with a subsistence based economy, but in the last several decades, some pastoralist societies, such as Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...
, have herded animals and practiced nomadic living patterns but have produced livestock primarily for market exchange.
Agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
, sometimes referred to as intensive agriculture, involves clearing and using the same plot of land for an extended period, sometimes several generations; it also involves the use of plows and draft animals in the preparation of land for planting and the cultivation of crops. Agriculture often supports much higher population densities than other modes of production (except industrialism) and agricultural societies can range in population from a few thousand into the millions. Though agriculture produces more food per unit of land area than the previously mentioned modes, the tendency of agricultural societies to focus on relatively few crops has often meant that these societies have much less diverse diets than foraging and horticultural societies. There is some archaeological and fossil evidence that populations in transition from foraging to agriculture have tended to suffer reduced stature, reduced musculature, and to exhibit other markers of malnutrition. Research has suggested that agriculture paradoxically allows a higher, but less healthy population for a given area. The advent of agriculture has marked that advent of social stratification in many parts of the world, with marked differentials in access to resources between segments of the same society. This mode of production also is more likely to entail permanent individual or family ownership of particular tracts of land than previously mentioned modes of production. Agriculture has co-occurred with both subsistence and market economies, often with a single society exhibiting some degree of both types of economies and has a more negative impact on the environment than the aforementioned modes of production.
Industrialism combines agriculture with mechanized industrial production of goods through the use of fossil fuels. Additionally, industrial societies use mechanized equipment in order to prepare land for planting, harvest crops, and distribute food to locations distant from where the original crops were planted. Industrialism shows similar trends to agriculture in terms of population density, and environmental impact, except to a much greater degree. Dietary diversity can be highly variable under an industrial mode of production and can depend on access to foods produced for local subsistence on the one hand, or to income level and purchasing power visa vie foods available in food markets (Leatherman and Goodman 2005). Dietary diversity and nutritional health often correlate with the degree of social stratification within an industrial society and sometimes between societies. With the exception of Soviet model states, industrial societies are heavily based on the concept of private property rights and the accumulation of profit through “free enterprise”.
The general trend for many societies over the past several millennia has been toward agriculture, and in the past two centuries, toward industrialism. Though these two modes of production are by no means superior to other modes in every respect, the fact that societies that practice them tend to have larger populations, higher population densities, and a more complex social structure has correlated with the geographic expansion of agricultural and industrial societies at the expense of societies emphasizing other modes of production. Concurrent with this trend toward intensified agricultural and industrial production has been the rise of the social and economic paradigm of capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, which entails the production and sale of goods and services in the market place in order to produce a profit. These trends have had profound implications for nutritional status for human beings on a global scale. In order to discern how broader economic and environmental trends affect a community’s food systems, food security, and nutritional status, it is important to summarize one of the most significant economic and ecological phenomena today, globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
. The next section will treat the linkages between economic and ideological trends over the last several centuries and environmental and political economic factors affecting access to food and nutritional status.
General summary of globalization
Though the scope and dimensions of globalization as most people currently construe it are of fairly recent origin, the broader phenomenon of global interconnections through cultural diffusion and trade is several centuries old. Starting in the late Fifteenth century, EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an powers expanded beyond the European sub-continent to found colonies in the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
, East Asia
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
, South Asia
South Asia
South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
and Oceania
Oceania
Oceania is a region centered on the islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Conceptions of what constitutes Oceania range from the coral atolls and volcanic islands of the South Pacific to the entire insular region between Asia and the Americas, including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago...
. This expansion has had a profound impact in terms of wealth creation in Europe and extraction elsewhere, cultural changes in most of the world’s societies, and biological phenomena such as the introduction of several infectious diseases into the Western Hemisphere
Western Hemisphere
The Western Hemisphere or western hemisphere is mainly used as a geographical term for the half of the Earth that lies west of the Prime Meridian and east of the Antimeridian , the other half being called the Eastern Hemisphere.In this sense, the western hemisphere consists of the western portions...
, which caused tremendous disruption and population reduction for indigenous societies there. These events, far from occurring coincidentally, have had synergistic relationships, in one vivid example, the decimation of Amerindian populations through infectious disease often preceding and facilitating subsequent conquest by European powers. Such conquests in turn have often had significantly negative impacts on internal cohesion, ability of populations to attain adequate resources for their own subsistence and traditional social obligations, and local environments for colonized societies. In order to understand the effects of globalization on nutritional status and food security, it is important to understand the historical circumstances that have led to contemporary globalization, and that still manifest themselves in political, social, material, and physical/health differentials between (and within) the different peoples of the world today.
In “The Rise of the Merchant, Industrialist, and Capital Controller”, written by Richard Robbins in 2005, uses a hypothetical scenario of the reader as a “merchant adventurer” to detail economic world history starting in 1400. In 1400, China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
was arguably the most cosmopolitan and technologically complex society in the world. It was a center of trade, along with the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
, East Africa
East Africa
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
, and ports on the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...
. Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
, while playing a part in this network, did not dominate it by any means; one could argue for European marginalization in fact. This circumstance began to change when the Europeans “discovered” the Americas, setting in motion a process that would disrupt many societies and devastate indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere. The dominant economic paradigm of this period was mercantilism
Mercantilism
Mercantilism is the economic doctrine in which government control of foreign trade is of paramount importance for ensuring the prosperity and security of the state. In particular, it demands a positive balance of trade. Mercantilism dominated Western European economic policy and discourse from...
, whereby European merchants began to achieve power in world markets and in relation to European governing aristocracies. Robbins cites example of government protections that facilitated mercantilism in the form of exclusive proprietary rights to trading companies and armies used to protect trade by force if necessary. He details instances of government protection such as the example of how Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
destroyed India's textile industry and turned that society into an importer of textiles is especially illustrative. In dealing with imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
, capitalism, and the rise of corporations, Robins further details the manner in which the “West” transformed various regions/peoples from proactive participants on global trade networks into sources of raw materials and consumers of European or North American
North American
North American generally refers to an entity, people, group, or attribute of North America, especially of the United States and Canada together.-Culture:*North American English, a collective term used to describe American English and Canadian English...
exports. This history of world trade is important to the consideration of current issues of disparity of power and wealth.
There are many critiques the policies of the World Bank
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
and the International Monetary Fund
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
(IMF) in the promotion of high intensity capital investment in developing nations (e.g. Weller et al. 2001; Fort et al. 2004). Disparities within nations and growing poverty rates in many nations also provide compelling evidence of the idea that the rewards of economic globalization are uneven at best. There is a great deal of literature about globalization and increases in health disparities both between and within countries.
Finally, there is Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...
with Development as Freedom
Development as Freedom
Development as Freedom is a book focused on international development written by economist Amartya Sen.-Background:Amartya Sen posits that all individuals are endowed with a certain set of capabilities while it is simply a matter of realising these capabilities that will allow a person to escape...
(1999); here Sen disagrees about whether or not the world’s poor are getting poorer, but also maintains that this criterion is not the most important. He argues that relative disparities and power differentials are the most important problems of globalization. Sen states that the increasing interconnection of the Worlds societies can have positive benefits, but that the disparities and opportunities for exploitation must be mitigated to the greatest extent possible, if they can not be eliminated outright. Sen provides groundwork for a nuanced middle ground between unabashed proponents and opponents of globalization.
Far from being universally decried, the recent accelerated expansion of western capitalism, geographically, politically, and ideologically, has been lauded in many quarters. International and bilateral agencies such as the World Bank, IMF, and the United States Agency for International Development
United States Agency for International Development
The United States Agency for International Development is the United States federal government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid. President John F. Kennedy created USAID in 1961 by executive order to implement development assistance programs in the areas...
(USAID) have utilized free market capitalist theories extensively in development programs in many corners of the globe whose state aims are to promote economic growth for communities and nation-states and to alleviate poverty. Likewise prominent individuals such as former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan is an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private advisor and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC...
and U.S. based journalist Thomas Friedman
Thomas Friedman
Thomas Lauren Friedman is an American journalist, columnist and author. He writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East, and environmental issues and has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.-Personal...
have held forth extensively about the possibilities of economic and social improvement in developed and developing nations alike, mainly through increased access to appropriate education, sophisticated communications and transportation technology, and a paradigm of social and economic “flexibility”, where individuals and communities who can best adapt to rapid changes in the role of governments and the particular economic base of a given location would be in the best position to take advantage of the opportunities offered by economic, political, and cultural globalization. This free market ideology is also predominant in the policies and procedures of the World Trade Organization
World Trade Organization
The World Trade Organization is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade , which commenced in 1948...
(WTO) and many transnational corporations (TNC’s), most of which are headquartered in developed nations. The rise of Capitalism and the free market society have indeed increased and exacerbated food insecurity in the world's poor due to the structure and function of a Capitalist society where only those who can afford to buy food to feed themselves are the only ones with access to a secure and adequate food supply. Food is no longer a human right to life and health due to the Capitalist approach to commodifying food in the free market society that as a result of globalization has spread all over the world. Transnational corporations and trade organizations such as NAFTA facilitate this approach of commodifying our world's food supply by enforcing laws and regulations which further deepen the inequality of wealth and unequal distribution of common goods such as food between the rich and the poor.
In contrast to the “western” economic model, most early social scholarship about economics stressed the predominance of reciprocity as a primary driving force in traditional non-Western societies. Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
referred to the gift as a “total social phenomenon”, fraught with ritual and socio political as well as material significance. Though some objects, such as armbands or shell necklaces in the kula ring that runs through several island groups off the coast of Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...
, might induce some form of prestige based competition, the terms of exchange are significantly different than a monetary transaction under a modern capitalist system. While Appadurai actually describes ritual objects as a type of commodity, he couches them as such under significantly different terms than the market-based types of commodity normally treated by economists. Annette Wiener criticizes earlier works in anthropology and sociology that depicted “simple” societies utilizing a simple version of reciprocity. Whatever the theoretical stance of social scholars on non-western traditional economies, there is a consensus that such essentials as food and water tended to be shared more freely than other types of goods or services. This dynamic tends to change with the introduction of a market-based economy into a society, with food coming to be increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than a social good or an essential component of health and survival.
Regardless of one’s overall perspective on the costs and benefits of economic globalization, there are several examples in social scholarship of groups of people suffering a decline in nutritional statues subsequent to the introduction of a capitalist market-based economy into an area that has previously practiced an economy based more on subsistence production and reciprocity. Although some people’s food security may improve with access to more steady income, many people in communities that have heretofore practiced a subsistence economy
Subsistence economy
A subsistence economy is an economy which refers simply to the gathering or amassment of objects of value; the increase in wealth; or the creation of wealth. Capital can be generally defined as assets invested with the expectation that their value will increase, usually because there is the...
may experienced greater food insecurity and nutritional status due to insufficient income to replace the foods no longer produced by a household. Whether the growth of food insecurity and socioeconomic disparities in many parts of the world in recent decades is an inherent part of globalization or a temporary “growing pain” until economic development attains its full efficacy is a matter of debate, but there are many empirical examples of communities being dissociated from traditional means of food production and not being able to find sufficient wages in a new market economy to achieve a balanced and calorically sufficient diet. Several factors affecting food security and nutritional status range on a continuum from more physical phenomena such as land degradation and land expropriation, to more culturally and socio-politically driven things such as cash cropping, dietary delocalization, and commoditization of food; one important caveat is that all of these trends are interconnected and fall under a broad category of socio-cultural and economic disruptions and dislocations under the current paradigm of globalization.
Land degradation
Though Blakie and Brookfield acknowledge the problematic aspects of defining land degradationLand degradation
Land degradation is a process in which the value of the biophysical environment is affected by one or more combination of human-induced processes acting upon the land....
, with definitional variation depending in large part on the scholar or stakeholder in question, they do outline a general idea of reduced soil fertility and reduced ability of a given area of land to provide for people’s subsistence needs, as compared to earlier periods in human history on that same land area. Paul Farmer
Paul Farmer
Dr. Paul Edward Farmer is an American anthropologist and physician. He is currently the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University, formerly the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, an attending physician and Chief...
discusses the effects of land degradation in central Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...
on local people’s ability to produce sufficient food for their families within the environs of their own communities. Farmer links malnutrition in a Haitian village with vulnerability to infectious diseases, including tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
and HIV/AIDS, both in terms of chance of infection and severity of symptoms for those infected. While the extremely low percentage of the U.S. population involved in agriculture strongly suggests that direct access to arable land is not an absolute necessity for food security and nutritional health, land degradation in many developing nations is accelerating the rate of rural to urban migration at a more accelerated rate than most major cities are equipped to handle. Leatherman and Goodman also allude to land degradation co-occurring with decreases in food security and nutritional status in some communities in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo
Quintana Roo
Quintana Roo officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Quintana Roo is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 10 municipalities and its capital city is Chetumal....
. Walter Edgar discusses the correlation between land degradation and economic disruption, as well as nutritional hardship, in the U.S. state of South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
in the decades following the Reconstruction Period. Coupled with land expropriation, land degradation has the effect of thrusting unprepared subsistence producers or other peasant farmers into a fast paced and complex market economy heavily influence by policy makers who are far removed from the concerns and worldview of small scale farmers in developing countries.
Land expropriation
Occurring for a variety of reasons, land expropriation, or the disruption of traditional ownership of land by more powerful interests such as local elites, governments, or transnational corporations, can also markedly affect nutritional status. Robbins details examples in Mexico of peasants facing land expropriation in the face of agribusiness consolidation under the North American Free Trade AgreementNorth American Free Trade Agreement
The North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA is an agreement signed by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994. It superseded the Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement...
(NAFTA); in many cases, these subsistence producers are forced either to migrate to cities or work sporadically as agricultural labors. Since most if not all food must be purchased under these circumstances, the food security and nutritional status of these newer additions to the pool of poor unskilled labor often declines. Another common impetus for expropriation is non-agricultural “economic development”, often in the form of tourism. In one Example, Donald MacLeod details curtailment of subsistence activities, mainly fishing and cultivation, in areas of the Canary Islands
Canary Islands
The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...
in the face of pressures from tourism interests wishing to monopolize the “pristine” beauty of locations catering to Germans and other tourists from EU nations. Ironically, local people see relatively little monetary benefit from the rise in tourism, as many vacations are planned by German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
tour companies (linked with all inclusive German owned resorts in the Canary Islands) and are paid for before tourists ever arrive at their vacation destination. Leatherman and Goodman and Daltabuit point to circumscription of land available for traditional milpa horticultural production in communities in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo in the face of growing demands for land for resorts by tourism interests, under the auspices of the Mexican national government. One expropriation scenario with a long history is cash cropping, where crops grown for revenue from exports are prioritized over crops grown for local consumption.
Cash cropping
In Sweetness and Power, written by Sidney MintzSidney Mintz
Sidney Wilfred Mintz is an anthropologist best known for his studies of Latin America and the Caribbean. Mintz studied at Brooklyn College earning his B.A in 1943. He got his doctoral degree from Columbia University under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict...
in 1985, details examples of mono-cropping, or planting massive areas with one cash crop, in several Caribbean Islands, including Cuba. He states that Cuba went from being an economically diverse place with many small scale subsistence producers to a mono-crop plantation system dependent on cash from its sugar crop and substantial food imports for the later centuries of the Spanish Colonial Period. He describes Cuba as an example of growing impoverishment and malnutrition concurrent with increasing concentration of land and other resources in fewer hands. Gross and Underwood illustrate the mid Twentieth Century example of the advent of sisal production in Northeastern Brazil. These authors detail a vicious cycle of the unfulfilled promises of sisal
Sisal
Sisal is an agave that yields a stiff fibre traditionally used in making twine, rope and also dartboards. The term may refer either to the plant or the fibre, depending on context...
production for smallholders; because owners of sisal processing machines did not think small farms worth their time, small holders could not process and sell their sisal and were often forced to work as laborers on large farms. Sisal is cited as being particularly insidious because it is hard to eradicate once introduced and makes subsequent subsistence production virtually impossible. This article treats a common situation of households prioritizing working males in food allocation, exposing growing children to malnutrition, particularly under nutrition and micronutrient deficiency, and all of its attendant ills. Edgar discusses how exclusive planting of cotton
Cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal....
in the Southeastern United States during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries caused substantial land degradation, lead to a great deal of land expropriation from small scale farmers, and occurred in a context of widespread malnutrition. Especially in Today’s complex, accelerated version of globalization, cash cropping is intimately linked with the delocalization of diets and the commoditization of food and has profound, though varied, implications for food security and nutritional status.
Delocalization and commoditization
In “Diet and Delocalization: Dietary Challenges since 1750”, Pelto and Pelto trace the concurrent historical development of global capitalism and dietary delocalization, a process in which increasing portions of diet for a household or community come from an increasing distance away from that same community. Nutritional scholars explicitly state that delocalization does not necessarily entail increased food insecurity and malnutrition, but that access to an adequate diet becomes increasingly removed from local control and increasingly contingent on access to hard cash or some other non-food precious resource. Leatherman and Goodman discuss the ironic result of their study in Quintana Roo that both the groups with the best and worst food security and nutritional status worked in service industries related to tourism, with the median group being a milpa community. They differentiate between those with stable employment and income who have access to a wide variety of foods on a regular basis and those with sporadic employment who struggle for caloric sufficiency within the household and have low dietary diversity. The main import of these examples is not that delocalization is universally negative, but that it tends to increase disparities of food security and nutritional status within and between social groups, with some segments suffering marked degradation of both.Closely linked with delocalization is food commoditization, or the treatment of food primarily as a market commodity, rather than prioritizing other uses, such as sustenance, human rights entitlement, or social relations. Dewey describes the deleterious effects of food commoditization for rural communities in Central America, to include reductions in food security and nutritional status. Much of tourism literature details marked increases in the commoditization of food subsequent to the introduction of tourism as a form of market based economic development. Dewey and Robbins also state that when food is primarily seen as a commodity by powerful interests, not only does such an ideology increase delocalization, but also land degradation and expropriation as elite land owners or transnational corporations cause massive social and ecological disruptions in the process of mono-cropping food crops over broad swaths of land in order to reap maximum profits from overseas sales. Indeed delocalization and commoditization have significant potential to diminish food security and nutritional status in poor communities over broad areas of the world.
Dietary health
In terms of food security and dietary diversity, which are defined as reliable access to a caloric sufficiency and access to a wide variety of macro and micro nutrients in order to maintain nutritive balance, respectively, the commoditization of food plays a key role in diminishing the control local populations have over their own subsistence production. Delocalization of food systems, which Pelto and Pelto define as taking production of food out of a local subsistence context and tying it to geographically broader market systems, can precipitate marked cultural and nutritional disruption. Likewise commoditization of food systems, defined as a paradigm shift from one of subsistence or social significances shift toward one which treats food primarily as a market commodity, can affect dietary health as well as collective identity. Commoditization tends to shift food security and dietary diversity away from integrated kinship or other reciprocal distribution networks toward being an issue of who can best compete in a free market to achieve these ends; indeed, commoditization has often been linked to breakdowns in food entitlements, which are defined as cultural or social norms that ensure food access for all members of a given social group.The deleterious effects of mild to moderate malnutrition
Malnutrition
Malnutrition is the condition that results from taking an unbalanced diet in which certain nutrients are lacking, in excess , or in the wrong proportions....
(MMM) not only pertain to caloric insufficiency (often closely associated with food insecurity) but also to poor dietary diversity; in particular, curtailed access to protein, complex carbohydrates, zinc, iron, and other micronutrients. The ways in which undernutrition and micronutrient deficiency interact with other health effects are myriad
Myriad
Myriad , "numberlesscountless, infinite", is a classical Greek word for the number 10,000. In modern English, the word refers to an unspecified large quantity.-History and usage:...
. The most obvious manifestation of MMM, stunting is defined as height and or weight below the standard range for a particular age group. However, far from being a mere difference in height and weight, stunting was correlated with a wide variety of health effects. Closely related to stunting, level of physical activity closely articulates with nutritional status and affects childhood development. Chronically malnourished infants and toddlers showed decreased physical activity compared to supplemented groups or those who are adequately nourished.
Perhaps, the most critical facets of human development correlated to nutrition levels are behavior and cognition; development in these two areas could have profound effects on life chances for individuals and populations. In comparing a group of southern Mexican children subject to MMM and a group in the same region who received dietary supplements, Chavez et al. show a relation between MMM and poorer school performance; unsupplemented children showed poorer participation, greater degree of in-class distraction, more sleeping in class, and poorer performance on standardized tests. In addition, malnourished children showed poorer scores on intelligence quotient
Intelligence quotient
An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several different standardized tests designed to assess intelligence. When modern IQ tests are constructed, the mean score within an age group is set to 100 and the standard deviation to 15...
(I.Q.) tests than their supplemented counterparts.
Of all the aspects of human existence, sexual reproduction
Sexual reproduction
Sexual reproduction is the creation of a new organism by combining the genetic material of two organisms. There are two main processes during sexual reproduction; they are: meiosis, involving the halving of the number of chromosomes; and fertilization, involving the fusion of two gametes and the...
may have the most detailed articulation with malnutrition. In populations subject to MMM, menarche occurs later (15.5 years) than in adequately nourished populations; an early average menopause
Menopause
Menopause is a term used to describe the permanent cessation of the primary functions of the human ovaries: the ripening and release of ova and the release of hormones that cause both the creation of the uterine lining and the subsequent shedding of the uterine lining...
(40.5 years) makes for a relatively short reproductive period for women in the study area for Chavez et al. Because of longer postpartum periods of amenorrhea, birth spacing was an average of 27 months, versus 19 months. Though longer birth spacing can help control population growth, the evidence that Chavez et al. present suggest a curtailing of reproductive choice and adaptability due to malnutrition. This study also linked maternal MMM with higher infant and young child mortality.
Another effect of MMM crucial to life chances is work capacity; MMM shows a cyclical pattern of decreasing work capacity and its rewards, further exacerbating the problem. Allen found a correlation between reduced VO2 max rates among MMM populations and decreased muscular strength and endurance in the performance of strenuous manual labor. Although personal motivation can have a strong positive impact on individual work performance, better muscular development associated with a history of adequate nutrition increases overall work capacity, irrespective of effort. Among Jamaican cane cutters, those within normal size range cut more cane than those who showed stunting. One cultural variation in this trend was found among MMM Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
n workers who put forth work effort comparable to better nourished counterparts, but were likely to engage in resting behavior than in recreational or social activity during off hours. In wage economies where workers get paid in proportion to productive output, reduced work capacity can translate to reduced food security, increasing the risk of MMM.
Additionally, malnutrition and infectious disease
Infectious disease
Infectious diseases, also known as communicable diseases, contagious diseases or transmissible diseases comprise clinically evident illness resulting from the infection, presence and growth of pathogenic biological agents in an individual host organism...
have a synergistic relationship that can lead to spiraling health deterioration. According to Allen, the incidence of infectious disease does not vary significantly between MMM and adequately nourished populations, but the duration and severity of disease episodes is greater for MMM populations. A key reason for this disparity is that infectious disease often results in poor food intake and nutrient absorption. Not only do sick people generally eat little, but what they do eat is often of minimal benefit due to nausea and diarrhea.
Aside from MMM due to under-nutrition or micro-nutrient deficiency, over-nutrition, defined as the consumption of too many calories for one’s body size and physical activity level, is also becoming an increasingly significant problem for much of the World. Overnutrition
Overnutrition
Overnutrition is a form of malnutrition in which nutrients are oversupplied relative to the amounts required for normal growth, development, and metabolism...
has been associated with obesity, which the USDA and McEwen and Seeman correlate with increased risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease
Cardiovascular disease
Heart disease or cardiovascular disease are the class of diseases that involve the heart or blood vessels . While the term technically refers to any disease that affects the cardiovascular system , it is usually used to refer to those related to atherosclerosis...
, and stroke
Stroke
A stroke, previously known medically as a cerebrovascular accident , is the rapidly developing loss of brain function due to disturbance in the blood supply to the brain. This can be due to ischemia caused by blockage , or a hemorrhage...
. Overnutrition is also often associated with the co-occurrence of caloric sufficiency (or over-sufficiency) and micronutrient deficiency, as is often the case where processed foods that are high in calories, but low in most nutrients, increase in dietary prominence. Leatherman and Goodman and Guest and Jones discuss the growing coincidence of stunting and other symptoms of MMM and obesity within developing nations, sometimes within the same community. This trend can be linked to changing economies and food practices in much of the World under contemporary economic globalization.